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Having recently upgraded my smartphone for the nth time, I found myself needing to automate a few tasks. Unlike my previous foray into Tasker automation however, my new phone is not rooted, nor do I plan to root it anytime soon.

I am a bit disappointed with Tasker and it seems I am not alone, as its author, Pent, appears to be a bit tired and fed up with updating his great creation. The app still has a 4.6/5 rating, with 39807 ratings, however, other apps are catching up. Automg has 4.8 – 1664 and costs $3.80 currently and comes, like Tasker, with a free evaluation version, MacroDroid (play-MacroDroid) 4.5 – 9731, Automate (play-autom) 4.4 – 7802. When I bought Tasker it felt like the only game in town; today I would try the ones above before setting on one app or buying it.

variation

I’ve found that the previous recipe for taking the photo of “Login Fiddler” still works, despite the phone not being rooted, and even expanded it with more info added into the filename. First, you define a variable and in the definition statement you jam in a bunch of system variables, such as %LOC (GPS coordinates), CELLID, KEYG, SIMNUM, SIMSTATE, WIFII, WIFI, UPS. They app shows you what each one is when you add them – these are my preferences, but you may have others. Then set the variable as the filename in the “take photo” task. Also, %LOC must be initialized with a task to get the GPS or net location.

I’ve created two additional profiles, one on and the other one off. The one that is on monitors for a special SMS text message that turns the other one on. In the sleeping profile I now have take photo when screen on. I may add additional tasks to that, but further testing is needed.

backup2sd

I added an SD card long after I bought my phone. It may be that if I had started using it with a card inside, more apps such as CSipSimple and the Gallery/Screenshots would have started saving to the SD card. As it stands, they all save to internal memory, causing me to run out of this precious resource. I created a Task for each directory that needs to be “moved” to SD. In the first statement I List the files in it into a variable (%scrshots for instance). Then I create a For loop via “Task” consisting of a For statement with the same %variablename and Items %variablename() – that’s like an array. I tried using the Move statement but it failed with an error, so instead I use a Copy statement (from %variablename to /storage/UID/SD/Card/Directory). The directory on the SD card must be under Android/data/net.dinglisch.tasker/ as that’s the only place Android allows Tasker to write.

I unchecked “run in the foreground” because I don’t want to see the notification all the time. We’ll see if this changes anything. I also got a strange prompt about Tasker being incompatible with phone encryption – need to look into this further.